Category: Uncategorized

What do these have in common: eugenics, pebble bed reactors and 40 million surplus males…

China in the 2020 “taking over the world”?

See this article about China’s eugenics program and its implcations for the future. The goal? Eliminate as many genetic defects as possible from the population via draconian measures that include sterilzation, abortion and infanticide.

A side effect? By the year 2020, China may have as many as 40 million “surplus” young men available for use in military adventures…

Oh, and pebble bed reactors? By that same year, China (with the aid of U.S. companies!) intends to have as many as 200 pebble bed reactors. The result? A projected power production sufficient for its own use and power for sale in amounts perhaps nearly equal to the current total world electrical power production.

With these in place, what then of the vaunted productivity, economic and military power of the U.S.?

Sleep well. Of course your children have nothing to be concerned about…

(link to China/eugenics article via Chaos Manor.)

Where do lost socks go?

It’s one of those paradoxes of the universe. One of God’s best jokes on humankind…

I’ve spent the last few months, in between bouts of plastering, painting, building, etc., throwing out boxes and bags and more boxes and bags of accumulated stuff. The heck with garage sales and taking to some collection center or whatnot, I’ve just been savagely purging stuff.

Now, here’s the paradox: we have less room for stuff tha n before I began “savagely purging” stuff. Now, where once two of the rooms downstairs were relatively free of stuff and could be used for, well, living in, there is almost no room to walk because boxes and boxes of other stuff have drifted out into the open and are now crowding out any human use of those rooms.

Upstairs is just as bad. As soon as an empty space is created, twice as much stuff creeps in under cover of darkness to crowd out human use of space.

What’s going on here?

You know, the really weird thing is that even as stuff creeps out of hiding places in some alternate universe to doubly crowd any space cleared of formerly-occupying stuff, not one lost sock has returned!

Go figure that one…

“Torn between two lovers… ”

It’s a big deal this year, apparently. Saying “Merry Christmas” has become a sort of battle cry for some who are simply fed up with Christian-bashing associated with tearing down crêches, deleting Christmas carols from kids’ school programs, and the bland “Happy Holidays” now being taken up as an “in your face” insult of the LLMB toward all things Christian about Christmas.

OTOH, whenever I hear “Merry Christmas” (or “have a nice day” for that matter), a small part of me wants to say, “Says who? You’re not the boss of me!” [heh]

For the gripping hand, see today’s post on Whisling in the Light

…why Rummy is, uh, rummy

Sean Gleason has the list.

My fav of Gleeson’s “…Reasons to Hate Rumsfeld”?

He has had most of his clothing outfitted with “buttons” and “zippers” to make dressing and undressing almost effortless.

Gleeson: very funny guy. But do not take my word on it. Check it out yourself.

Engineering a Christmas Miracle

Linked from Instapundit (I wonder why? :-), this article by Glenn Reynolds at Tech Central Station extols the renewal of Christmas civility brought to us, well, let him say it:

…with online shopping picking up some of the slack, and in the process relieving the crowds, congestion, and frustration associated with traditional retail Christmases, old-fashioned Christmas shopping might actually become pleasant again, in a way it hasn’t been in decades — all thanks to the Internet.

Now there’s a Christmas miracle. Brought to you not by elves, but by the people responsible for most of the miracles in our lives: Engineers!

(Glenn, for those who are still unaware of it, is a blogophere giant. His Instapundit blog is a daily must-read. Oh, no wonder his article is linked from Instapundit… [heh, heh] Yeh, I’m not exactly giving him a hat tip for linking his own article. 🙂

Yeh? Well, get your own dirt

Instapundit links a story about researchers who are making “progress toward artificial life”—what was once called “creating life in a test tube.” However, key info from the article reveals that they are close to building an “erector set” version of life, not even approaching creation at all:

The soft cell walls are made of fat molecules taken from egg white. The cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli, stripped of all its genetic material.

This essence of life contains ready-made much of the biological machinery needed to make proteins; the researchers also added an enzyme from a virus to allow the vesicle to translate DNA code.

When they added genes, the cell fluid started to make proteins, just like a normal cell would.

Yeh, well, if they want to create a lil life on their own, they ought to get their own dirt first. This is more akin to someone being proud of baking cookies they bought at WallyWorld. Sure, they opened the package and put ’em in the cookie jar. Big whoopie.

New York’s 31 Electors fail to cast votes for John F. Kerry

As amazingly stupid as it reveals the brilliant LLMs of new York to be, it’s true: every stinking last one of New York’s electors failed to cast their votes for the person they were pledged to vote for.

Don’t get me wrong: none of them defected to Bush, and all of them, apparently, voted for The Prancing Pony for Veep. But none of them cast their votes for John F. Kerry!!

Even I had difficulty believing it.

See the official document to which each of these vaccuum-headed loons set their signatures.

A thinking man’s “hit list”—counting down the top 20 liberal hits

John Hawkins at Right Wing News has his list of the 20 most annoying liberals in the U.S. up. A sample, from #17:

“Listening to [Jimmy] Carter’s advice about how to run the country is like listening to Bill Clinton explain how to be faithful to your wife: nobody buys it, nobody wants to hear it, but they nod along because he used to be the President and they have to show some respect no matter how annoyed they are.”

A tad snarky? Yeh, but spot on, for all that.

Oh, you want another excerpt? Well, who am I to deny you one of this life’s wholesome pleasures? Here’s a quote at the linked post from #6, Chris “Loudmouth Liberal Lemming” Matthews:

“I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.”

Sure, you do, Chris. Unfortunately, even Chris Matthews knows that if he challenged someone to a duel , they’d get to pick the weapons. Hmmm, how about “Wit at 50 paces”? It wouldn’t be fair, of course. In a duel of wits, Matthews wold be totally unarmed.

Now, if it were a screaming match…

(h.t. Powerline)

A brief comment, since no one’s asked, about my bio claim to being “over-educated”.

Think of me as a highly trained monkey, treading water as best I can in the ocean of theology, the sea of philosphy, the lake of science, the doggie bowl of popular culture and the cesspool of politics and Mass Media.

That’s quite a list of accomplishments even for a multiple personality monkey “educated” far beyond his native intelligence.

A real life tort law question

OK, so a guy stopped for a sobriety test is killed by another driver who turns out to be drunk as a skunk. A tangled web of liability, indeed… (h.t. Instapundit)